Patrick Durrant | Sydney
The word ‘collaboration’, much like ‘innovation’, has been bandied about with some regularity in defence industry circles of late but what does it really entail?
Consultant KPMG, tasked with assisting Government and Defence in the daunting task of building defence industry capability, has released a report outlining what successful collaboration looks like and its vital importance for achieving the overarching aim.
In a defence collaboration survey conducted by KPMG in 2016 with defence and industry staff, 87 per cent of those surveyed were either implementing a model of collaboration or planning to in the next 12-24 months. However significant challenges remain with 74 per cent ranking culture and leadership of their organisation and that of their main partner as the significant barriers to more collaborative relationships.
“If the culture is wrong then it's just not going to work.”
Attitudes and behaviours, according to the report, will count more than contracts and policy when it comes to establishing effective collaboration.
“Collaboration may be the single most important skill needed in the 21st Century security environment,” KPMG Australia's Defence and National Security Sector leader Steve Clark said. “But unless it can be embedded in the people, commercial models and incentives for the whole defence sector it will become a box ticking exercise.”
The Integrated Investment Program is intended to facilitate the whole-of-life and whole-of-capability approach to investment.
Defence's new Capability Life Cycle (CLC) requires industry involvement earlier in the process, with engagement expected to commence routinely before Gate Zero for most projects.
According to the report, this new approach will require capability developers to be flexible and fast, as well as a change in behaviour from all involved.
“Quite simply, early engagement with industry is going to be the key to taking advantage of what industry has to offer so that we are all working together to ensure our warfighter has the best,”former CEO Lockheed Martin ANZ Raydon Gates said.
While frameworks, standards, and models were important, KPMG stated it was the culture of the organisation that “makes or breaks collaboration”.
“By this we mean the style of leadership, the language used, the unspoken atitudes and norms of practice, the organisation's openness to change or to the new, and the incentives and deterrents that shape the behaviour and interactions of staff.”
The report details characterisitics of effective collaboration and provides numerous case studies highlighting experiences of the UK MoD and the healthcare sector.
ADM attended the NSW Collaboration for Defence Symposium held at the University of Technology Sydney yesterday and discussion around what success in collaboration looked like was one of the key talking points. The event, hosted by UTS, NSW Department of Industry, AIDN NSW, SADIG and HunterNet, featured guest speakers representing industry, academia and government and concluded with a panel discussion.
The panel featured Air Marshal (Retd) John Harvey, NSW Defence Advocate; Professor Chun Wang, UNSW, head of mechanical and manufacturing engineering; Benjamin Hayes, assistant secretary Defence Industry Policy Division; Mark Baker managing director Sonartech Atlas; and Darren Burrowes, CTO The Blue Zone Group.
Burrowes said that from an SME's perspective, a meeting of equals was essential when it came to engagement with academia and Defence.
“Ultimately, IP needs to be delivered into the hands of SMEs smoothly so that they can quickly utilise it, especially in this age of rapid technology advancement,” he said. “At the end of the day all of that IP is funded by public money and having it sit on the shelf doesn't do anyone any good.”
He said culture eats strategy for breakfast, “if the culture is wrong then it's just not going to work”. Burrowes also said technological conversations between SMEs and Defence needed to be reinvigorated.
Baker said understanding the customer base was key, and not just that here in Australia, but all over the world. “There is a distinct difference, in our experience, with the customers here and the customers overseas.”
He agreed with Burrowes that there had to an effective way for those who developed IP to get a return on their investment – “that means you may have to be prepared to accept the fact that you are giving it for nothing to an SME to utilise it in the first instance, but you will get licence fees or some form of compensation as the technology gets into the market”.
He added that communication needed to improve, especially within industry but also between industry and the customer and also in some instances within the customer base.
Prof. Wang said within universities there had recently been a shift towards an application or translation research focus and more engagement with industry.
He wanted to see researchers participating in as many projects with industry as possible and cited the Defence Science Institute in Melbourne as an “excellent platform and vehicle for engaging universities into partnerships with companies in a collaborative manner”.
Harvey said that when talking about industry in terms of sovereign industrial capabilities, “we mean much more than that, it also embodies the research capabilities, the technology design capabilities – I'm not sure how we get around that, the word ‘industry’ has a certain attraction but we can't forget that it is much broader than that”.
Hayes said that risk was a big issue and that the development of the Innovation Hub was an embodiment of Government's greater appetite for risk when it came to defence procurement.
"One of the things we're trying to do through the Hub is that rather than presenting ourselves as the broker of collaboration, we're tapping into the expertise that already exists in the ecosystem, for example DMTC and DST Group; we want to leverage off those things rather than develop something new and clunky”.